Category Archives: Thinking About Visual Artifacts

Cultural Dissonance in a 19th-Century Newspaper Illustration

The post originally appeared in Surfacing Memory: Seeking the Voices that Inform Me, a multimedia site where seminar leader Susan Morse explores artifacts and heirlooms in an effort to reconstruct her own family’s history. Our gratitude to Dr. Morse for sharing this personal story here in hopes that it will serve as a model for Humanities Core students’ own oral history and artifact-based research projects this quarter.

“Do not judge your neighbor until you walk two moons in your neighbor’s moccasins” (Cheyenne Proverb)

Just above illustrations pictured below was written the date

I’m not sure if this date refers to when the nine panel “funny” was originally published in the newspaper or to when it was pasted in the McNiven (my great great grandmother’s and then Jesse McNiven’s) Scrapbook. There are very few clues to indicate in which newspaper (or in which country) this illustration was even printed. Given my knowledge of the McNiven family time-line, there is a distinct possibility it appeared in a Canadian newspaper prior to the family exodus to the then American territories to the south. Then again, in 1879 they may still have been in Scotland.

What interests me about these possibilities is that the illustration clearly demonstrates a fascination with empire; in particular with the clear demarcation between the old inheritance-based British Empire and the newly expanding American empire making its presence known deep into the “Wild Western frontier.” What’s more, the panels characterize — or even satirize — a clear cultural dissonance between these positions that makes possible a third and more compelling ethnographic reading outside of empire altogether.

So let’s try walking through this illustration wearing different pairs of moccasins to see how each fits beginning with the caption at the end of the illustration which reads:

Given ethnolinguistic references from the 19th century, it is clear from the caption that an American Indian (pejoratively described as a “Red Shirt”) and a cowboy (also referenced negatively as an untamed or wild “Broncho Bill”) have been invited to a hunting event but one that will not align with their expectations. The superior “Master of Hounds” serves as the host for this occasion, and given this final revelation it seems clear that from a socio-cultural context this event would be both foreign and unknowable to the two American men, something that gives satire some legs. Spoiler aside, the caption confirms the medium’s rhetorical design as one that will draw on cultural dissonance to drive a particular narrative.

Our narrative begins with an American Indian traveling together with a fairly stereotypical characterization of an old “Wild West” cowboy. The two ride together in peace and in harmony with each other and in nature; the horses also moving in step. The teepee and war bonnet place the American Indian in a tribe, like the Cheyenne, that hunts and follows the seasons and the movement of big game; bison in particular. Other noteworthy markers — such as the feathers and long war bonnet — situate the American Indian riding in the front as both his tribe’s leader as well as a singularly courageous and prominent member of his tribe.

Traditionally, tribal members earn their first eagle feather to commemorate a rite of passage into adulthood. I witnessed this ritual annually while coaching and living on the Salish-Kootenai Reservation in Arlee, Montana while I was an undergraduate. Tribal elders presented High School seniors with an eagle feather along with their diplomas at the Graduation ceremony. After the presentations were completed, one of the Tribal Elders explained that the American Indians from the northwest and plains region consider the eagle to be the bravest and strongest of all birds. Not only does this spirit travel with the feather, but also anyone who possesses and wears a ceremonial eagle feather carries honor and pride at being one of the First Peoples (feathers were offered to all non-tribal seniors as well). As a final gesture, the Tribal Elder waved his feathers over the crowd as a means of wishing everyone in the community prosperity, peace and happiness.

Additional feathers are then awarded following actions recognized by the tribe as courageous or heroic. The feathered head dress pictured above, for example, conveys much more than this man’s role as the tribal chief. This war bonnet signals a lifetime’s worth of feathers earned through heroic action. Additionally, the warrior’s pole he carries and the horse he rides contain a number of overflow feathers earned. Finally, both the war bonnet and warrior’s pole are ceremonial, reserved for special occasions, and serve as a sign of respect for the coming event – say, for example, a ritualistic hunt or an invitation to meet with a “neighbor” in the Cheyenne sense of the word.

This ethnographic reading of the two Americans, however, may have been lost on the readers of the time who might have preferred instead to see these men as wild and weak or inferior in comparison to the imperial power whose newspaper they read. The chief, for example, carries his own teepee, a task usually reserved for women in the tribe. This, along with a hyperbolic abundance of ceremonial feathers offers those sympathetic to the British Empire a rhetorical reading of this so-called great and heroic leader as anything but formidable or worthy. The cowboy representative of the American Empire maintains an even weaker position, since he trails behind the chief and rides a paint horse. The paint horse — a mix of Barb, Andalusian and Arabian breeds — was originally brought to the frontier during the Spanish “conquest” of the Americas by Cortez and his Conquistadors. Nineteenth century associations of the paint horse by white colonizers and Europeans were pejorative given its mixed blood, connections with a defeated imperial intervention and its most common association as the “Big Dog” or “God Dog” of the American Indian, in particular with those tribes that hunt and wage war on the plains.

Additionally, although later panels of this illustration clearly name the cowboy as a man, the depiction above not only feminizes him, but it also places him in an even more inferior, weaker position in contrast to the already emasculated chief. His long, free flowing hair characterizes his identity as untamed, wild and therefore “savage” or uncivilized according to beliefs that were widely-held by Europeans (as well as by their descendants living in the established states of America) at this time. As a representative of the American imperial machine, the feminized American stands in sharp contrast to the masculinized British “Master of Hounds” (not yet pictured but named in the closing caption). This man — the “Master” — is a figure with distinction, a man fronting a clear title and legacy bound to a deep, long-standing aristocratic British tradition. Unlike the “Master,” the cowboy bears the name “Broncho Bill.” His identity characterizes him, in part, as a “broncho” (or the more common bronco) which in “Wild West” equestrian circles describes an untamed and untrained “frontier” horse. Interestingly, it is also a term used to denote a mustang, another mixed breed of range pony introduced to the American territories by the Spanish (and which continue to run feral in the hills to this day). Moreover, this man is identified by first name only and does not garner societal distinction enough to hold a family name; therefore this (Imperial agent) “broncho” represents an uncivilized, culturally mixed emasculated man, but this is not a reliable ethnographic reading. Let’s get back to that…

The second panel in the series reflects — on the one hand — a harmonious, symbiotic relationship between the American Indian and his cowboy companion. In this frame, the cowboy prepares what is mockingly described as “light refreshment” presumably for both men as the chief smokes a pipe, a ceremonial gesture signaling agreement with a covenant between parties or preparation for a planned ceremonial event. Perhaps he smokes in this case to acknowledge the invitation to join “the Hunt.” The horse adorning the teepee elevates this animal to a spirit or totem animal that symbolizes a balance between personal drive and untamed passions, between individual agency and a responsibility to others, quite suitable given the chief’s role in his community. Harmony extends also to the two horses standing behind the teepee that have been acculturated to two different traditions, and that live and rest comfortably together which parallels the two men who bear markers to clearly different yet compatible ways to exist and to live together.

On the other hand, the designation of this space as a “Wild West Camp” recalls earlier depictions of the American representative of empire as uncivilized and weak. What’s more, the cowboy performs a woman’s labor by preparing the refreshment and probably also by serving the chief who currently smokes alone. I’m partial to the symbiotic and harmonious reading, of course, but as someone who studies this history, I must acknowledge the generosity of such a narrative in hindsight given widespread and systematic atrocities perpetrated against the First Peoples by agents of American imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Negative attitudes about the First Peoples were perpetuated in part through cultural dissonance (through the notion of a “gender frontiers,” for example), the implications of which are clearly depicted in panel three. It appears that a well-dressed local (looks a little “dandy” to me) on an afternoon walk has just happened on the cowboy and the chief engaging in some afternoon teepee relations — so to speak — with the chief having taken a superior position. This interaction sharply mocks American colonizers (represented by our “broncho”) as having succumbed to or been seduced by the so-called “unnatural behaviors” of the “savage” American Indians.

Additionally, the depiction of the chief places him in an overtly sexually aggressive stance counter to the man passing by. This exchange facilitates what might have counted in 19th-century America as a threat to white culture; first, through a mixed race, same-sex relationship and second, through the aggressive encounter triggered by the exposure of, what looks like, a naked and virile “Indian” chief to the startled, unarmed white stranger shown as innocently passing by. The cultural reality, however, is that heteronormative ideals and constructs didn’t really exist among American Indian tribes until they were imposed on them by European colonizers. And — as an interesting aside that the illustrator may not have known — American Indian hunters traditionally abstained from intercourse for a few days prior to a hunt as part of a ceremonial practice (abstinence from sex to produce an abundant bounty during the hunt).

The threat of a blended culture to imperial civilization and legacy continues to figure prominently in panel four. Clearly, the sight of the American Indian chief and “Wild West” cowboy seems so strange and “savage” in contrast to the waiting members of the British hunting group, that neither the “civilized” men nor beasts among them including the dogs can control its feelings or “sensation[s]” of desperation. At the same time, and funnily, the two Americans calmly and quietly enter the scene to witness pure chaos as the well-dressed, British fox hunters struggle to sit or to control their mounts and hounds marking a clear dissonance between the cultural groups.

The cultural disconnect depicted in this frame and implied throughout the illustration extends primarily to the differences between what counts as a hunt for each group. The British riders with their hounds are waiting for a Fox Hunt, a sport of leisure (pffft) that goes back to the 16th Century that does not yield any food as bounty for a successful run. The primary objective of this kind of hunt is the performance of human superiority over animals, of wielding control over a pack of trained dogs to chase down and to kill the red fox. These unarmed riders (chasers more than hunters) work together with the “Master” of the hounds to control and to direct their hounds as they search for, chase down, and kill a fox victim. The Master may then choose to reward those hunters who perform most admirably during the event with some trophy from the dead fox — a paw, the mask, or the tail (the biggest honor). The remaining carcass is then tossed to the hounds. Very civilized indeed and then light refreshment follows.

However, one doesn’t have to look beyond the above panel to recognize that the chief and his partner had a much different hunt in mind. The chief who is positioned as standing and surveying the landscape in front of him, clearly, searches for big game — most likely bison — as the objective of the hunt. This hunt does not describe a mere sport for those in the American “frontier.” The hunt for bison (buffalo where I come from) which may last a single day or several, ideally yields tens of animals all of which are honored, eaten, worn and otherwise utilized by members of the tribe. No part of the animal goes to waste. In terms of a hunting bounty, the hunter responsible for bringing a buffalo down with his bow and arrow is entitled to claim the hide and some of the choicest meat cuts as his prize.

An even more special prize for American Indians — like the Cheyenne — is marked by a hunter’s first kill, where as his trophy and as an important rite of passage, he will drink some of the blood of his kill. While drinking the blood of a freshly killed animal may seem at first savage (and certainly would for the Fox Hunters), this is in reality a culturally short-sighted position. American Indians live in harmony with nature, belong to the land and see themselves as brothers to the animals they kill. Blood symbolizes the force that gives life to all beings. The blood, along with the animal that sacrifices it, is a gift that deserves and demands respect (a message my Navajo godfather Jimmy John relayed to me throughout my childhood). A hunter who drinks the warm blood of the animal he has killed demonstrates his deep respect for the animal’s sacrifice. It also symbolizes that the life of this animal will continue in the hunter. In death, the animal’s body (and blood) serves as a gift that will ultimately prolong the lives of many in the hunter’s tribe. Given this naturalist reading of the scene, the calm entry of the two men signifies their harmonious relationship with nature, with their horses and with each other.

The British hounds, however, are not in harmony with this nature but express such a discord at the sight of these two individuals and their horses that the American men must hide until the more “civilized” and trained hounds will no longer be negatively affected (or even influenced) by their presence (which really pushes the “othering” boundaries).

Throughout these panels, the harmony and symbiosis of the two American men persists, despite rhetorical efforts to depict them as weak, emasculated and inferior. This symbiosis and harmony between the men, their horses and their inner nature or “impulse” continues in frame six as the men are thrown from their mounts. It is unclear what particular impulse led to this unexpected ejection (perhaps it simply mocks them as irrational creatures), but the double stop of the horses and the double flight of the men further illustrates an equity between these two men even though they clearly come from different cultural backgrounds (and from different equestrian traditions). They remain in harmony with each other and with the natural world including with their inner “impulse.” And their horses aren’t getting ready to run away from the men (which you’ll notice on the next frame).

In panel seven the two Americans are back on their mounts and chasing after “information” about some “natives” depicted above that look quite like British citizens, don’t they? In fact, these “natives” resemble 19th-century bobbies, a police force first put in place in London in the early 19th century to maintain law and order on the British home-front. Perhaps the spoof here is on the American wanton disregard for the British imperial claim on the western territories. These two “wild” Americans lack the decorum to perform accordingly at the Fox Hunt. Their very presence disrupts the event precisely because they are “savage” outsiders or “others” in the context of European Imperialism. Further taking the above panel into account, they wildly chase these “natives” without control over their own trajectory (or their mounts) at the same time as they fail to recognize the so-called “native” claim to the land as conferred by the panel’s caption. There is a sharp irony that features one of the First Peoples in this fight against the “natives”: one, because he travels with a member of the American Imperial team and two, because the British bobbies claim “native” ownership, which, as we know, was but one of many attempted European interventions on territory already fully populated by a diverse, self-regulating, autonomous indigenous population.

Have you noticed a clear lack of narrative between some of these panels? So have I! Two consistent features, however, seem to be the persistence of satire and the two Americans. The above scene, for example, satirizes “frontier” scouting techniques, although it is quite unclear what these men are trying to find, and where the third guy came from. Maybe they are still scouting for the “information” they were seeking in the previous panel. The above depiction of “Broncho Bill” mocks his lack of scouting skills as he presumably uses his hand to reach for scat and other tangible clues about the particular “scent” they seek. The illustration pokes further fun by depicting the American Indian as literally utilizing a white man to accomplish this same task (which seems much more practical) and which degrades the white man’s and the cowboy’s ethos. In reality, however, American Indian scouts enjoy a long-standing reputation as quasi-diviners who can detect and read seemingly obscure natural signs, or pick up a trail by vibration and sound, or observe and gather vital knowledge about an enemy without detection.

And so we come to the final frame in the series, which appears to answer a few unanswered questions, offers a clear commentary about the two American riders, and throws an additional means for understanding the “hunt” into conversation. As it turns out, the hunt and the scouting excursion seem, in the last few frames, to have been to locate one of any available run-away horses for the British rider to carry him back home. Although many of these panels have promoted a claim of British superiority, when it comes to real riding, this Brit and his mount look spent. In this panel, the Brit trails behind both American riders who begin and end their journey on their own horses, illustrating that they are both good riders and possess “good riding knowledge,” perhaps a positive nod to having “impulse” that may be akin to sound horse sense. This stands in stark contrast to the Britisher who was dismounted and who lost control of three different horses. It doesn’t appear that he even travels home on his own horse. Also noteworthy is that while there were consistently negative characterizations of the two American men, they are referred to in these final lines as “our Wild West friends” who (you may have noticed) have been riding and working together for some panels now.

“Our Wild West friends” bring me to the final tidbit about this peculiar illustration. According to the caption that follows this final panel (the one we began our discussion with), the hunt was set to meet in Hertfordshire, but there is no Hertfordshire in America or in Canada. The closest is a county located in southern England. After all of this consideration and analysis, in the end, it is possible this illustration may not have been published or set on the North American continent at all but rather took place in the 19th-century British imagination.

Perhaps this illustration nods to early iterations of the “Wild West” spectacles, the most famous of which are the Buffalo Bill Wild West Shows. If you do any digging, you’ll certainly notice a lot of Bills as headliners (Pawnee Bill, Buckskin Bill, Buffalo Bill…Broncho Bill). Smaller versions of these shows began in England in the early 1870s and featured an array of “frontier” types that fed consumer curiosity about “unnatural” oddities of the American “Wild West” including cowboys, American Indians, infamous outlaws, lady sharp shooters, etc. These curious figures were all put on public display and observed and marveled and consumed for their “strange” manners like any number of traveling “freak shows” and other marvels of nature that were popular in Europe in the 19th century. Is it possible that “Our Wild West Friends” depicted as living in symbiosis and harmony with each other and in nature were actually meant to stand in as marvels of nature in a kind of illustrated “Wild West Freak Show” published in a British newspaper way back on January 1, 1879? If that was the intention, then the joke is on them for having missed the deeper meaning. I think I prefer walking around in my neighbor’s moccasins for a few moons…

After Professor Sharon Block’s lecture on Thursday, April 13th, I decided to add a postscript:

The moccasins to the left above are mine and were made in the traditional way. Men perform the hunt and women perform the remaining labor. They dress the animal, prepare the meat, other animal parts, and hide: scrape, tan, chew (yes, you read that correctly) and smoke the leather. The bead work was done by Jeannie Peak whose mother is very famous in the region for traditional beaded crafts she made for famous people like the Queen of England and Roy Rogers (of old Western Film and Radio Spectaculars). Many members of the area tribes — including many of my Salish friends in Arlee, MT — are descended from American Indians converted in the late 1800s to Catholicism (see the Mission in St. Ignatius, MT). The flower on the two pieces above is the “Salish Rose,” symbolic of femininity, fertile bounty (reproduction), and the natural cycles of life. The Salish Rose also has a second meaning that most outside of the community might not know; it is a symbol of the Catholic Sacred Heart of Christ. The second piece — the necklace featured to the right above — is traditionally worn by Salish women who participate in tribal and intertribal dancing ceremonies and rituals called Pow Wows (during fourth of July weekend in Arlee). The Shawl Dance or the Traditional Dance are danced by the American Indian woman to celebrate her femininity, her role within the tribal community, and her direct connection to mother nature.

Susan Morse is a continuing lecturer in the Humanities Core Program at UC Irvine, where she has enjoyed teaching for many years. She received her PhD in German Studies from the UCI Department of European Languages & Studies in 2006. She also studied Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Psychology and English at the Universities of Montana and Arizona, which is another reason why she loves teaching in the Humanities. Her research focuses on Holocaust memory and the limits of representation in the Holocaust. In addition to leading seminars in Core, she also enjoys teaching a Romantic Fairy Tales course for the Department of European Languages & Studies and Comparative Literature.

Vinayak Chaturvedi’s Winter Quarter Playlist

Asian Dub Foundation performing live in Berlin, November 2008

To the delight of students and seminar leaders alike, Professor Chaturvedi has been sharing politicized songs that bring together musicians and sound profiles from the South Asian and Afro-Caribbean diaspora before each of his Humanities Core lectures. Here is his essential HumCore playlist, along with some videos and additional information about the artists that have been featured.

Steel Pulse, “Handsworth Revolution”

More information on Steel Pulse available here.

Burning Spear, “Marcus Garvey” and “Christopher Columbus”

More information on Burning Spear available here.

Asian Dub Foundation, “Rebel Warrior,” “Fortress Europe,” and “Naxalite”

More information about Asian Dub Foundation available here.

State of Bengal, “Flight IC408”

Riz MC, “Englistan”

For more information about the Asian Underground movement in 1990s British rock, Professor Chaturvedi recommends Vivek Bald’s documentary Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music. You can also stream music like this (along with newer bands) through the BBC Asian Music Network.

Vinayak Chaturvedi is an associate professor of history and faculty lecturer in the Humanities Core Program at UCI this cycle. He is the author of Peasant Pasts: History and Memory in Western India (University of California Press, 2007) along with many articles on South Asian social and intellectual history, including “A Revolutionary’s Biography: The case of V.D. Savarkar” in Postcolonial Studies, “Rethinking Knowledge with Action: V.D. Savarkar, the Bhagavad Gita, and Histories of Warfare” in Modern Intellectual History, and “Vinayak & Me: Hindutva and the Politics of Naming” in Social History.

The Shakespearean Cadences of The King’s Speech (2010)

The following is a revised version of a talk given as part of a “Shakespeare on Film” panel at the 2013 Popular Culture Association/ American Culture Association National Conference in Washington, D.C., and, like Writing Assignment 4 for this cycle of Humcore, it performs a comparative analysis on an example of Shakespearean appropriation, identifying how certain themes originally appeared in Shakespeare’s plays and then reflecting on how these themes have changed in the process of adaptation. For students currently writing and revising their own essay drafts, it offers a model of how to a) select and incorporate relevant passages from Shakespeare, b) use secondary sources to develop a central argument, and c) describe and analyze film as a medium. While this post does not rely heavily on the technical vocabulary of film analysis (a good introduction to which can be found here), it does include detailed descriptions of the various scenes and cinematic elements being analyzed. Students may compare these descriptions with the actual excerpts of the film provided throughout to get a sense of how to translate the medium of cinema into written form.

Dramatizing the historical events surrounding George VI’s ascension to the English throne in 1936 after his brother Edward VIII famously abdicated to be with “the woman I love,” The King’s Speech eschews the more typical Hollywood melodrama of Edward’s romantic scandal and instead follows George VI (“Bertie”), played by Colin Firth, during his personal battle to overcome a debilitating stammer and become the inspirational spokesman for a nation on the brink of war. The film is part of a new wave of historical cinema that has revived the most salient elements of the Shakespearean history play, particularly the genre’s fascination with crises of sovereignty and the role of individual personality in the ineffable tide of historical change. But unlike the epic costume dramas of the 1960s, such as Becket (1964), A Man for All Seasons (1966), or Anne of a Thousand Days (1969), these recent films are set within the pointedly modern contexts of mass media, celebrity culture, and global politics. Other examples of this cinematic trend include Peter Morgan’s films The Deal (2003), The Queen (2006), and The Special Relationship (2010), which explore the recent history of Britain through the career of Tony Blair, while the HBO films of Danny Strong – Recount (2008) and Game Change (2012) – apply the genre to contemporary American politics.

The King’s Speech, however, is the film that most consciously and explicitly engages with its Shakespearean influence, embodied in the character of George VI’s Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue, played by Geoffrey Rush. Screenwriter David Seidler cleverly exploits the biographical fact that Logue was an amateur Shakespearean actor to weave the Bard’s words and themes throughout the film. In fact, Logue’s very first appearance on screen is attended with a Shakespearean quote. In this scene, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, played by Helena Bonham Carter, having come to Logue’s office to enlist his services for her husband, discovers a rather drab and dilapidated space. Emerging from the bathroom with the sound of a flushing toilet receding into the background, Logue, aware of the impression his home can make, quips, “Poor and content is rich and rich enough” – a line from Othello. When Elizabeth responds with a bemused, “I’m sorry,” Logue promptly interjects, “Shakespeare. How are you?” and thrusts out his hand in a remarkable gesture that fuses citation and introduction – as if he were claiming to be the Immortal Bard himself.

Logue’s practice of speaking with a Shakespearean cadence reflects, at one level, his status as a product of empire. As an Australian transplanted to London, Logue is an outsider in love with an English cultural tradition that actual English men and women seem all too ready to deny him. To drive this marginalization home, the film presents a brief interlude where Logue auditions for an amateur Shakespeare troupe from Putney, the leader of which barely lets Logue get out the lines to Richard III’s opening soliloquy before cutting him off with a derisive, “I didn’t realize that Richard III was king of the colonies.”

But the allusion to Richard III in this scene serves as something more than just an opportunity to illustrate Logue’s experience of cultural rejection. Instead, I want to suggest that it represents Seidler’s winking acknowledgement of the film’s conscious appropriation, and often inversion, of a host of Shakespearean themes and tropes.

In fact, the overall arc of the film’s action is an ironic reversal of the plot to Richard III. In Shakespeare’s play, Richard III is presented as a man who, because he possesses a defect that keeps him from enjoying a private life, pursues instead a path of public ambition through cunning and strategizing. As the hunchback Richard tells the audience in his opening monologue, “since I cannot prove a lover / To entertain these fair well-spoken days, / I am determined to prove a villain / And hate the idle pleasures of these days” (1.1.28-31). In the King’s Speech, however, Bertie’s “defect” frustrates the demands and expectations of his public position, and where Shakespeare’s murderous “Machieval” claws his way to the crown by sheer force of will, Bertie practically has to be dragged there kicking and screaming. When Bertie’s wife tells Logue that her husband has to speak publicly and can’t switch jobs, Logue jokes, “indentured servitude?” She replies, half-grinning, “Something of that nature, yes.”

Benedict Cumberbatch as Richard III in PBS’s The Hollow Crown (2016)

Indeed, this sentiment of being overwhelmed by public duty and desiring the life of a private man is a common theme in Shakespeare’s histories. In Henry V, a play about one of England’s most celebrated medieval kings, the eponymous ruler delivers the following melancholy reflection, just before the fateful battle of Agincourt:

O hard condition,

Twin-born with greatness, subject to the breath

Of every fool, whose sense no more can feel

But his own wringing! What infinite heart’s-ease

Must kings neglect, that private men enjoy!

And what have kings, that private men have not too,

Save ceremony, save general ceremony?

And what art thou, that suffer’st more

Of mortal griefs than do thy worshippers? (Henry V, 4.1.233-42)

Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton University Press, 1997)

This “twin-born” nature of English monarchs – one of Shakespeare’s favorite history play tropes – was famously identified by the medieval historian Ernst Kantorowicz as the doctrine of “The King’s Two Bodies” – the first, a mortal, natural body that is the seat of the private individual, and the second, a political, deathless body that is the abstract embodiment of the English nation continuing in perpetuity.[1] According to Kantorowicz the concept of the “two bodies” developed in legal discourses of 16^th century as a necessary bridge between the mystical, theological concepts of the medieval imagination and the modern secular notions of the state. In a seminal reading of Shakespeare’s Richard II, Kantorowicz asserts that “the legal concept of the King’s two bodies cannot…be separated from Shakespeare” because it was Shakespeare who “eternalized the metaphor” in a way that continues to shape the cultural imagination of Western civilization.[2]

As a modern historical drama about a modern sovereign, The King’s Speech certainly plays upon Shakespeare’s eternalized metaphor, but it does so with a keen awareness that the metaphor has undergone a fundamental re-imagination since the 16^th century. Indeed, the modern conception of the English monarchy, starting with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, has been marked by a concerted effort to suppress the importance of the King’s natural body and to completely divorce the private will of the sovereign from the functioning of public authority.[3] “If I’m a king, where’s my power?” Bertie exclaims in the penultimate scene of the film, acknowledging this limited and circumscribed role the monarch now inhabits: “Can I form a government? Can I levy a tax? Declare a war? No.” But the mystical element that still peeps through, the one that almost embarrassingly attests to the fact that the king is still the clumsy persona mixta of a pre-modern constitutional tradition, is the importance of the voice. “And yet I’m the seat of all authority” Bertie continues, “Why? Because the nation believes that when I speak I speak for them.”

While acknowledging the dull reality of 20th century kingship, The King’s Speech nevertheless takes seriously this mystical kernel still alive and active in the operation of sovereignty. For even in the modern age, it is the sovereign’s voice that the nation is supposed to respond to, particularly in times of crisis, and this voice therefore continues to function as the symbol of a stable and secure order. But the film is not merely fascinated with the mystical authority of the king’s voice in the abstract; its interest also lies in the unique historical moment of the early 20th century, when the development of broadcast technology raised the stakes of the sovereign’s personality in new, and potentially disruptive, ways. “In the past, all a king had to do was look respectable in uniform and not fall off his horse,” George V, played by Michael Gambon, grumbles to his son Bertie, “Now, we must invade people’s homes and ingratiate ourselves with them. This family’s been reduced to those lowest, basest of all creatures. We’ve become actors.”

Extending and ironizing this analogy between royal authority and public performance, the visual vocabulary of the film draws remarkable parallels between the traditional iconographies of royalty and the material technology through which that royalty will be translated in the age of mass media. Thus, the very first images of the film are a series of lingering shots upon a single microphone, impressive in its bulk and resembling a kind of missile, as if to suggest that one false move will unleash its powerful, destructive force. This, as the film’s framing implies, is the new throne, the new crown.

Microphone as New Seat of Power in The King’s Speech (2010)

We are then shown the pre-broadcast ritual of a nameless BBC announcer, wherein the film offers a kind of visual parody of a coronation ceremony, inviting the audience to witness the anointing and blessing of the voice before it takes its place in this new seat of power.

The fact that it is a nameless BBC announcer undergoing this parodic coronation emphasizes the profound effect that this new technology will have upon the nature of power and authority. Later in the film, when Bertie and his family have finished watching a newsreel of his own coronation, the images and sounds that immediately follow are of Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies. Bertie sits silently watching Hitler’s bombastic performance as a young Princess Elizabeth asks, “Papa, what’s he saying?” “I don’t know,” Bertie wryly replies, “but he seems to be saying it rather well.”

As the film suggests, for a consummate speaker like Hitler, the technology of the microphone magnifies his personality, and it is in this act of technological magnification, rather than the force of custom or tradition, that the authority of modern authoritarianism is created. Bertie, by contrast, with an authority based on a tradition much bigger than his individual self – the thousand year legacy of British royalty – finds himself dwarfed and overwhelmed by the prospect of personal magnification, a theme that the film’s director Tom Hooper signals brilliantly through camera angles and shot composition, wherein microphones are continually eclipsing and obscuring Bertie’s face.

Motif of Microphones Obscuring Bertie’s Face in The King’s Speech (2010)

Bertie’s stutter thus operates as a kind of return of the repressed, embarrassingly foregrounding the continued fact of the king’s physical presence, his natural body. The plot of the film, therefore, principally revolves around achieving some kind of harmonious re-alignment of the two bodies paradox.

Enter: Lionel Logue with his Shakespearean eloquence and radical approach to speech therapy. And while Bertie’s rise to the throne is a reversal of Shakespeare’s Richard III, his friendship with Logue recalls and inverts many of the tropes contained in the Prince Hal/ Falstaff relationship of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2.

Simon Russell Beale (left) as Falstaff and Tom Hiddleston (right) as Prince Hal in PBS’s The Hollow Crown (2012)

Like Bertie, Prince Hal, in Henry IV, Part 1, condescends to a state of familiarity and equality in order to learn how to “speak” the language of his subjects, proclaiming while in the riotous company of Eastcheap, “I can drink with any tinker in his own language during my life” (2.4.18-20), a skill that will later serve him well when he must rally his troops before the battle of Agincourt – a feat he achieves through his famous St. Crispin’s Day speech, calling upon his “Band of brothers” to shed their blood with him (Henry V, 4.3.18-67).

Hal’s Rejection of Falstaff Upon Becoming King Henry V (from an 1830 Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays edited by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke)

However, Hal must ultimately renounce Falstaff and the friendship that taught him this speech because of the threat that such a private friendship poses for the public good. Shakespeare famously illustrates this threat in Falstaff’s reaction to hearing of Hal’s ascension to the throne, where the reprobate knight proclaims, “the laws of England are at my commandment” (2 Henry IV, 5.3.136-7), a sentiment which exemplifies the common Renaissance fear that corrupt personal advisors might turn the king’s power into a tool for private gain.

The filmmakers seem very cognizant of the threat Logue represents within the confines of these older tropes, and interestingly, there are many sinister associations with Logue’s character subtly sprinkled throughout the film. Consider for instance the visual sequence of Elizabeth’s initial visit to engage Logue’s services for her husband. First, we see her in a chauffeured car on her way to the office, but because of the thickness of the fog, a man walks out in front as a guide. Then, upon arriving, she must cage herself in a rather menacing-looking elevator and wait for its slow decent to a lower floor. Though very slight visual cues, the fog and the elevator give the unsettling impression of entering a kind of Grecian underworld. The man guiding the Duchess’s car through the fog in particular conjures up images of Charon leading a freshly arrived soul across the river Styx.

Then we have Logue’s Shakespearean quotes themselves, all of which come from very sinister contexts. Besides Richard III, the “poor and content” line is spoken by Iago and is delivered during the very scene where he first plants the doubt about Desdemona’s virtue in Othello’s mind, a doubt that will eventually ripen into the murderous jealousy that causes Othello’s tragic downfall. Logue’s third instance of Shakespearean quotation comes in the form of Caliban’s famous “Be not afeared” speech describing the The Tempest’s enchanted Isle (3.2.135-43), a speech which Logue delivers, with an impromptu hunchback, for the entertainment of his sons.

While the lyricism of the speech is breathtaking, it’s important to remember that, in its original context, Caliban is trying to convince the newly shipwrecked commoners Trinculo and Stephano to kill Prospero for him – an instance of the colonized subject attempting to destroy the man who holds sovereign sway over him.

Russell Brand as Trinculo (left), Alfred Molina as Stephano (center), and Djimon Hounsou as Caliban (right) in Julie Taymor’s The Tempest (2010)

Granted, the film never depicts Logue as harboring violent intentions toward Bertie, but it does position him as a subversive figure. The suspicion of Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang, played by Derek Jacobi, towards Logue, particularly in the run up to Bertie’s coronation, is construed by the film as mostly being motivated by class snobbery. However, the suspicion also arises from the aforementioned fear that personal advisors and favorites to the king can become threats to the constitutional order. Here we may again recall Falstaff’s hopes in Hal’s succession or the figure of Piers Gaveston as depicted in Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II. Visually, the film registers this age-old suspicion of favorites in its shot composition and its staging. Consider, for example, the camera angle during Bertie and Logue’s conversation, prior to Edward’s abdication, about whether or not Bertie has the potential to be king. As if showing us Bertie’s own internal interpretation of how taboo such a consideration is, the film frames Logue as a kind of devil on Bertie’s shoulder, whispering treasonous temptations into his ear.

Or consider the image that we get during the rehearsal for Bertie’s coronation. Having dismissed everyone but Logue, Bertie falls into a fit of despair, asserting that he has only come to this point because of Logue’s ambition to have a star pupil in the future king. Getting up from the throne and looking off into the distance, Bertie morbidly imagines that his legacy will be that of “Mad King George the Stammerer, who let his people down so badly in their hour of need that…” Bertie does not complete the self-pitying prediction because as he turns, he sees Logue casually lounging in Saint Edward’s chair, as naturally as if he were king himself.

Finally, during the climactic wartime broadcast where Bertie announces Britain’s entry into World War II, the crucial moment towards which all of Bertie’s speech therapy (and thus the film as a whole) has been building, we are given the visual of Logue actually conducting Bertie as if he were some kind of orchestra (see edited clip below). However, the film only raises these symbolic fears of usurpation in order to demonstrate that they are unfounded. Logue’s sitting in Saint Edward’s chair merely serves to demonstrate that Bertie does not need to be intimidated by the materials of ceremony. (Here, Bertie’s self-affirming shout of “I have a voice!” is essentially the film’s feel-good climax). And well before the conclusion of the wartime broadcast, Logue has stopped conducting and stands transfixed, listening to his King’s voice as merely one subject among many. In this climactic moment, we, as an audience, are meant to see how much Logue has helped Bertie discover his own voice and become his own man, registered in the shot composition by a suspended microphone that now reflects Bertie’s face rather than obscuring it.

By inverting the old Shakespearean tropes, the film validates and indeed celebrates the king’s personal friendships as an essential means to fulfilling his royal duties – a touching twist for any Shakespearean critic who thought Hal’s rejection of Falstaff was an unkindness too difficult to stomach. In fact, Logue’s insistence upon intimacy while treating Bertie, and his psychological approaches to speech therapy (an historical inaccuracy on the part of the filmmakers), remind us that the King’s Speech not only updates its Shakespearean themes according to modern media, but also updates the problem of the King’s two bodies, and the king’s voice, in the context of post-Freudian psychology. As the Lacanian critic Mladen Dolar has written in his work, A Voice and Nothing More, “we are social beings by the voice and through the voice; it seems that the voice stands at the axis of our social bonds, and that voices are the very texture of the social, as well as the intimate kernel of subjectivity.”[4] Indeed, the film presents Bertie’s stuttering as originating in the formation of this “intimate kernel of subjectivity” and further exacerbated by the process through which it gets integrated into a larger social fabric. Significantly, Logue is able to convince Bertie to start therapy through a trick. In what has become the film’s iconic scene, Logue asks Bertie to read Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy while listening to classical music blasting through a set of headphones. Logue records Bertie’s performance on a record, which Bertie refuses to listen to until much later. When he finally does, however, hearing his voice reciting Shakespeare’s most famous speech without hesitation or mistake, he immediately begins treatment. This trick works, the film implies, for two reasons. First, it allows Bertie to efface himself, to not be crushingly self-conscious of his own voice while he is speaking. Second, the recording allows him to experience his own voice from the perspective of another, to be alienated enough from it to see it as an object in itself.

As the film suggests, at a deep psychological level Bertie lacks confidence in the world of social response that his voice is supposed to elicit. Here we might recall how, according to Kantorowicz’s concept of the King’s Two Bodies, the peripeteia of Shakespeare’s Richard II occurs when the besieged monarch loses confidence in the mystical power of his kingly capacity and at last becomes aware of his own limited creaturely existence: “I live with bread like you, feel want, / Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus, / How can you say to me, I am a king?” (3.2.175-7). In Bertie’s case, however, the loss of faith is much more profound, for we learn that as a child he was subject to abuse by a nanny who wouldn’t feed him, and that it took his parents three years to notice. The scene in which this information is revealed becomes all the more poignant by the incorporation of one of Logue’s speech therapy techniques introduced earlier in the film. In that earlier scene, Logue explains to Bertie that singing his words using a familiar melody can help keep him from stuttering, at which suggestion Bertie tries the melody to “Swanee River.” So when Bertie later begins to talk about his childhood and the stress of his memories increases the severity of his stammering, Logue advises him to sing it, which results in Bertie confessing the awful neglect of his nanny – “then she wouldn’t feed me” – while finishing with the original lyrics to “Swanne River” – “far, far away.” It’s a brilliant bit of staging on the part of the filmmakers, as it serves to underscore how this traumatic experience instilled feelings of isolation and distance in Bertie, and ultimately caused him to lose faith in the power of his own voice to bridge that distance.

A big part of Logue’s therapy throughout the film, then, is to create a smaller version of this world of social response, a more intimate realm somewhere between the purely public and purely private, where Bertie only needs to worry about a single recipient and can be confident that this recipient is a friend. This theme is most directly illustrated in the final scene where Bertie delivers his inspiring wartime broadcast in a small room just to the side of the palace offices. Only Logue is there, instructing Bertie to “Say it to me, as a friend.” Coupling the intimate space of self-with-other with a palpable demonstration of mass media’s potential for self-amplification, the scene finally banishes the specter of totalitarianism and tyranny heretofore haunting the film’s meditation on modernity and sovereignty, opting instead for the emotionally satisfying resolution of melodrama, albeit (it must be admitted in this context) melodrama of the highest order.[5]

But it behooves us as attentive viewers to recognize the quaint nostalgia at the heart of this melodramatic resolution – a nostalgia which readily acknowledges the first half of the 20^th century as a time of political and social upheaval, but nevertheless takes comfort in the assurance of a worthy future ahead. How else are we to understand the bizarre incongruity of the film’s final moments, where a declaration of war is greeted not with sadness or trepidation, but with relief and triumph, as family members and palace officials cheerfully applaud Bertie like a sports movie underdog who’s just won the big game?

By contrast, at the dawn of 21^stcentury, though we feel a commensurate sense of social and technological upheaval, what we lack is that easy faith in the brighter tomorrow, the confidence that the bitter struggle ahead will inevitably lead to some grand, ennobling victory. We shouldn’t forget that, even though it won Best Picture in 2010, The King’s Speech wasn’t the only historical drama on that year’s list of Oscar contenders. David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network garnered as much, if not more, critical and popular acclaim as the King’s Speech, but the tone and guiding metaphor of each film could not be further apart.

Even the title, The Social Network, evokes a de-centered, depersonalized world of distributed power and murky social obligations, while the film itself structurally refuses to empathize with or reject its central protagonist through the frame story of a legal deposition, leaving it unclear whose version of events is the truth. Through the course of the film, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg, is portrayed as a social maladroit, whose rise to the top is fueled by a combination of unimpeachable talent, unshakable resentment for the existing social hierarchy, and just a dash of Machiavellian ruthlessness – in other words, like a Richard III. Clearly, the more unsettling strains of Shakespeare’s tragic vision have not been rendered obsolete by the modern age, but indeed continue to resonate with contemporary doubts and anxieties about where our society might be headed.

We must ask ourselves, therefore, what it says about our own historical moment that, when it came time to choose between these two films, popular imagination and institutional recognition in America longingly bent toward the comforting paradigm of the past, indulging an atavistic impulse to listen to and follow the steady, singular voice of a sovereign.

Notes

[1] I must acknowledge Robin Wagner-Pacifilci’s post on the blog Deliberately Considered as the first public identification and discussion of this aspect of the film. 1/10/11. < http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/2011/01/the-king%E2%80%99s-speech-the-president%E2%80%99s-speech/>

[2] Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 26.

[3] The classic analysis of the sovereign’s circumscribed and symbolic role in England’s post-1688 constitutional government is Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution (1867).

[4] Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 23.

[5] For an analysis of the relationship between sovereignty and friendship in Renaissance literature, see Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

Robin S. Stewart received his Ph.D. in English from UC Irvine in 2013, specializing in early modern British literature and Shakespeare. He has written previously for the Humanities Core Research Blog on Empire and the Nation-State Before the 18th Century. For interested students, he will be teaching a course on Shakespeare (E103) during the upcoming Summer Session that will be coordinated with the New Swan Theater’s productions of The Tempest and Taming of the Shrew. Students who enroll in the course will read three plays (The Tempest, Taming of the Shrew, and King Lear), analyze various film versions of each, and, as their final assignment, write their own creative adaptation of a chosen Shakespeare scene.

Empire and the Nation-State Before the 18th Century

“What is my nation? Who talks of my nation?”
Shakespeare’s Henry V, Act 3, Scene 2

What separates an empire from a nation?

Hans Ulrich Franck, Der Geharnischte Reiter [Knight in Armor] (1603-75). Etching.

When I asked my students this question during our first seminar, they offered two very apt responses. First, they suggested, empires are relics of the past, and now we only talk seriously of nations. Second, if and when we do use the word “empire” today, they observed, it’s almost always negative: a label you attach to political or cultural entities that you consider corrupt or undesirable (e.g. when Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire” during the Cold War); whereas “nation” evokes positive feelings of belonging and encourages pride in your ethnic or cultural heritage.

Both observations accurately capture our contemporary attitudes and assumptions, and they reveal the great extent to which the nation-state – “an area where the cultural boundaries match up with the political boundaries” – is now regarded as the most natural and efficient form of political organization possible. But as should be apparent from our lectures in HumCore thus far, this has not always been the case. In fact, the concept of the nation-state itself did not even come into being until the 17^th century, and its elevation to the preferred form of political community didn’t happen overnight but instead progressed slowly over the course of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. So, as we transition from Professor Zissos’s lectures on the Roman Empire to Professor Steintrager’s on the European Enlightenment, it will be helpful to think about how this thing we call the nation-state came into being and how it conditioned European attitudes toward empire that would ultimately influence our own. In doing this, we will be following a scholarly method pioneered by the preeminent French philosopher Michael Foucault called genealogy, which is an attempt to discover the origins, and explain the historical evolutions, of our contemporary concepts, social behaviors, and values.

Population loss in Germany during the Thirty Years War

As it happens, the origin of the nation-state was a topic covered in the last cycle of Humanities Core, which centered on the theme of “War.” In that cycle, Professors Jane Newman and John Smith, both from UCI’s Department of European Languages and Studies, gave a series of lectures on the legacy of the Thirty Year’s War (1618 – 1648), a devastating conflict that ravaged central Europe (mostly in the area of present day Germany) and killed almost a third of the continent’s population before hostilities ceased. (NB: all the previous cycles of HumCore are archived on the program’s website, so you can find the materials for these lectures here if you’d like to explore the subject further.) And as Professors Newman and Smith explained, the extremity of the Thirty Year’s War arose from a number of factors.

First, it was a war based on religious identity, where Protestants and Catholics both refused to recognize each other’s right to rule their own lands and assumed a kind of divine sanction for invading the other’s territories. Though both forms of Christianity, Protestants and Catholics saw each other in antagonistic and apocalyptic terms during the 16^th and 17^th centuries, with each defending their own doctrines as absolute truth while attacking their opponents as sinfully corrupt, almost demonic. In the context of England, which is my area of research, this extreme religious prejudice can be seen in the title page of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), a history published under Queen Elizabeth I that chronicled Catholic persecutions of Protestants.

John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (London, 1563). Houghton Library Collection at Harvard University.

Starting at the bottom of the image (right), we can see how the two forms of Christian practice (Protestant on the left, Catholic on the right) are contrasted. Moving up the page, the Protestants on the left undergo holy martyrdoms celebrated by a trumpeting chorus of saints and angels. On the right, the Catholic ritual of the Eucharist is literally figured as devil worship, by its positioning beneath a cloud of jeering demons. Christ himself sits in judgement, blessing the Protestant side with his raised hand, while condemning the Catholic with a lowered one. Within the pages of the Acts itself, Foxe, like many other Protestant propagandists of the age, equated the papacy with the biblical figure of Antichrist, claiming that the Catholic Church had falsely usurped the ancient authority of the Roman empire and had used it to unlawfully tyrannize over the whole of Christian Europe. As Foxe writes in Book 1 of the 1576 edition of the Acts:

Insomuch that they [the Popes] have translated the empire, they have deposed Emperors, Kings, Princes and rulers and Senators of Rome, and set up other, or the same again at their pleasure; they have proclaimed wars and have warred themselves. And where as Emperors in ancient time have dignified them [popes] in titles, have enlarged them with donations, and they receiving their confirmation by the Emperors, have like ungrateful clients to such benefactors, afterward stamped upon their necks, have made them to hold their stirrup, some to hold the bridle of their horse, have caused them to seek their confirmation at their hand, yea have been Emperors themselves. (29, original spelling and diction modernized)

To call this an attitude leaving little room for compromise or diplomacy would be an understatement.

Second, the Thirty Years War was fought mostly by mercenary forces in the pay of various European noblemen, rather than by the kinds of well-disciplined and publicly funded armies that characterize modern nation-state militaries. As a result, soldiers were given to unrestrained rape and pillage of the civilian population, taking food and other resources that they needed to sustain their campaigns from local farms and towns. In short, it was the kind of total, chaotic war comparable to the conflicts involving Syria and ISIS happening today.

The Treaty of Westphalia (1648)

But the lasting significance of the Thirty Year’s War, as Professors Newman and Smith argued, came from how it ended. Weary of the prolonged carnage, the various sides finally came together to negotiate the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. With 109 signatories, the treaty settled a number of key issues for international relations in Europe. First, it defined (and thus ended disputes over) a number of contested borders, producing an exact map of European national territories for the first time. Second, it upheld the principle that each country had the right to abide by whatever religious identity its ruler chose, a principle encapsulated in the Latin phrase cuius regio, eius religio (“whosever realm, his religion”). Finally, it acknowledged that each nation had sovereignty over its own domestic affairs, which should not be subject to interference by any outside power. And thus, the nation-state was born: the “nation” part coming from the common identity produced by the relatively homogenous cultures and religious affiliations contained within the borders of each country; and the “state” part coming from this inchoate principle of sovereign self-determination.

The Treaty of Westphalia also signaled the weakening of religion’s hold over the political, moral, and intellectual outlook of European society – a trend that would reach full expression in the Enlightenment a century later. Take, for example, the concept of sovereignty that Westphalia established. In some ways it is similar to Roman imperium, as both denote a kind of absolute authority to command and order society it rules over, but importantly sovereignty claims neither to be universal (i.e. it applies only within the recognized borders of an individual nation) nor divinely sanctioned. Moreover, it was during the period of the Thirty Year’s War that the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes developed his influential theory of government and politics, a theory that based political authority, which Hobbes calls sovereignty, on materialist reasoning rather than religious belief.

Abraham Bosse, Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. London (1651). Collection of Houghton Library, Harvard University.

According to Hobbes’s account, humans form governments in order to escape the “state of nature” – a condition in which there are no laws and individuals are in a constant state of war with each other for resources and dominance. In his most important work Levithan (1651), Hobbes offers the following description of what life in this state of nature would have been like:

In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. (Book I, Chapter XIII)

Thus Hobbes argues that, In order to escape the miseries of the state of nature, individuals come together to form a “social contract,” an agreement whereby they give up their liberty to do whatever they want and place themselves under a common power (i.e. sovereign), who will keep the peace, enforce laws, and maintain order. In Leviathan’s striking title page (right), or frontispiece (which has been an endless source of scholarly interpretation itself), we can see the basic principles of Hobbes’s new philosophy rendered visually, as the sovereign’s body is allegorically composed of all the individual subjects that have legitimized his power through the social contract.

Moreover, by looking at the iconography of Hobbes’s earlier work, we can appreciate the extent to which Hobbes consciously intended for his philosophy to pry European ideas about government from the religious foundations upon which they had previously rested.

Jean Matheus, frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes, De Cive (Paris,1642). Collection of Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Consider, as evidence for this intention, the frontispiece to his work De Cive (“On the Citizen”) (left), which was published a few years before Leviathan and is where Hobbes’s most important concepts, like the state of nature and social contract, were first articulated. Note how the work’s title page includes a Christ in judgement at the very top, similar to the religious iconography that animated Foxe’s title page we saw earlier. But here a horizontal division is created in addition to the vertical one, whereby the lower half of the image offers Hobbes’s conceptual replacements for the apocalyptic dualism above. On the left, the figure of Imperium – representing government, order, and civilization – stands with sword and scales before a background of cultivated fields and industrious production. On the right, Libertas, figured as a Native American with bow and spear, represents the state of nature, before a background depicting scenes of war and competition. Thus, Hobbes visually replaces the theological categories of salvation (i.e. an eternal reward for correct religious belief and practice) and damnation (i.e. the eternal punishment for failing to believe and practice correctly) with the secular categories of civil society and the state of nature, and what he’s essentially saying to his European readers is that state authority, and each individual’s loyalty to it, should be determined by its observable ability to prevent worldly disorder, rather than its uncertain relationship to religious truth.

So, now that we’ve sketched a brief genealogy of the nation-state, how might we use it to enrich our understanding of the material that we will be encountering during Professor Steintrager’s series of lectures?

One way is to ask ourselves how the legacy of Westphalia and the Hobbesian emphasis on natural origins were taken up and re-interpreted by our assigned Enlightenment writers. For example, consider Kant’s definition of enlightenment as “the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority,” which is in many respects a translation Westphalian sovereignty to the level of the individual. Rousseau, on the other hand, offers a mixed set of attitudes toward the legacy of 17^th century thought. He would himself take up the question of social contract, but unlike Hobbes, who considered human life in the state of nature to be wretched, Rousseau elevates nature to such an extent that he perceives greater virtue in those untouched by civilization.

Second, as we move into the topic of the British empire, it’s important to remember that it was an empire that developed after the invention of the nation-state, meaning that its organization, administration, and ideology should offer interesting distinctions from the kind of empire practiced by the Romans. What does it mean to have an empire with a nation-state at its center? Does the nation-state produce an empire that is more colonial in nature than the empires that existed before the nation-state? How did the sovereignty of the British monarchy operate differently within the borders of the United Kingdom than it did in the greater territories of the empire?

Or perhaps, even after producing our historical genealogy of the nation-state, might we still consider that nation and empire may not be that different after all?

Works Cited

Kant, Immanuel. “What is Enlightenment?” Political Writings. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 56-60. Print.

Robin S. Stewart received his Ph.D. in English from UC Irvine in 2013, specializing in early modern British literature and Shakespeare. In its various forms, his research focuses on how pre-modern and early modern texts can offer productive opportunities for rethinking the origins of, as well as supplying alternatives to, our contemporary cultural assumptions and values. His most recent publications are “Last Judgment to Leviathan: The Semiotics of Collective Temporality in Early Modern England” in Temporality, Genre, and Experience in the Age of Shakespeare: Forms of Time, Ed. Lauren Shohet (Arden Shakespeare, Forthcoming 2017) and “Early Modern Drama & Emerging Markets,” in Routledge Companion to Literature & Economics, Ed. Michelle Chihara & Matthew Seybold (Routledge, Forthcoming 2018). In addition to teaching in the Humanities Core Program since 2014, he teaches upper-division courses on Renaissance literature and Shakespeare, as well as writing courses in UCI’s Program for Academic English/ESL. He spent this past summer giving a talk on Chinese adaptations of Shakespeare in Hong Kong, seeing a lot of local theater, and preparing for the birth of his first child, due this December.